Constructing a Safety Culture!

A consortium of engineering firms comprising Technip, Snamprogetti, MW Kellogg and Japan Gas Corporation (TSKJ) employed a 20,000 strong multi-national workforce, consisting of Nigerians, South Koreans and many European and American ex-patriots. Concerned to ensure the well–being of the workforce, B-Safe® was engaged by MW Kellogg to implement behavior-based safety.

Checklist DevelopmentB-Safe® provided a list of typical unsafe behaviors found in the construction industry. These came from Prof. Dominic Cooper's earlier HSE research and other work in the construction industry. These were assigned to ‘Observation Checklists’ matching the phases of the building program.

ProcessInitially, 150 volunteer observers were recruited and trained to use the checklists, give feedback and set targets with their workgroups in the observation areas set up on site. These observers monitored their colleagues in the construction areas for 10-20 minutes a day for four weeks, to find out how safe people worked.

Based on the 4 week 'baseline period', each workgroup then set an improvement target. Observers continued to monitor daily and verbally gave feedback when observing people. Observation data was given daily to the project coordinator for data entry and analysis. The observers each received a weekly analysis for their areas to give as feedback at weekly feedback meetings.

The project team also followed up any corrective actions, the status of which was reported back to the workgroups. This cycle of events was repeated every 30 weeks or so.

ResultsOver 19.4 million man hours, the projects Lost Time Incident Rate (LTIR) fell 0.13 to 0.03 . Similarly, the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) also reduced from 0.66 to 0.15. These reduction figures represent a 77% improvement across the board.

MW Kellogg later implemented B-Safe® in Algeria, Belgium, Egypt, and Norway on turnarounds and similar projects.